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Material Type | Library | Call Number | Item Barcode | Location |
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Book | Searching... Chelmsford Public Library | BIOG/STEVENS | 31480010944681 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library | BIOGRAPHY STEVENS, NE. | 31330008246906 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Hamilton-Wenham Public Library | B STEVENS, NELL | 30470001527547 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Haverhill Public Library | BIOG/STEVENS N | 31479006833502 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Middleton - Flint Public Library | B STEVENS | 32126001530000 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Newburyport Public Library | BIOGRAPHY STEVENS N | 32128003522308 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Westford - J.V. Fletcher Library | B STEVENS | 31990004425943 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
A girl, a laptop, and a waddle of penguins. In this witty and genre-defying memoir, a young writer can travel anywhere she wants to finally finish her novel--and ends up on a frozen island at the bottom of the world.
Twenty-seven-year-old Nell Stevens was determined to write a novel, but life kept getting in the way. Then came a game-changing opportunity: she won a fellowship that would let her live, all expenses paid, anywhere in the world to research and write a book. Would she choose a glittering metropolis, a romantic village, an exotic paradise? Not exactly. Nell picked Bleaker Island, a snowy, windswept pile of rock in the Falklands. There, in a guesthouse where she would be the only guest, she could finally rid herself of distractions and write. Before the spring thaw, surely she'd have a novel.
And indeed, other than sheep, penguins, paranoia, and the weather, there aren't many distractions on Bleaker. Nell gets to work on a charming Dickensian fiction she calls Bleaker House --only to discover that total isolation and 1,085 calories a day are far from ideal conditions for literary production. With deft humor, the memoir traces Nell's island days and slowly reveals details of the life and people she has left behind in pursuit of her writing. They pop up in her novel, too, and in other fictional pieces that dot the book. It seems that there is nowhere Nell can run--an island or the pages of her notebook--to escape the big questions of love, art and ambition.
Terrifically smart, full of wry writing advice, and with a clever puzzle of a structure, Bleaker House marks the arrival of a fresh new voice in creative nonfiction.
Reviews (5)
Guardian Review
Worried that she had lived too boring a life to write good fiction, Stevens set off to a remote island. Her book's best feature is its honesty "I want to know how good at life I can be in a place where there are no distractions," Nell Stevens explained to her mother on the phone. She had left her home in London to do a postgraduate degree at Boston University, and was now considering what to do during her "global fellowship" -- a three-month study period in which students were encouraged to travel, explore, and write. "And where is that, exactly?" her mother asked. "The Falklands," said Stevens. "I think it's the Falklands." She doesn't report her mother's response -- perhaps a puzzled silence. Stevens had no connection to the Falkland Islands, and had never been there before. She had no great interest in the islands' history or culture, though she pretended otherwise on her fellowship application form. She had simply chosen the loneliest, most deserted and distraction-free place she could find, the aptly named Bleaker Island, a windswept outcrop of mud and rock in the southern Atlantic Ocean, part-time home to one farming couple, whose house she would be renting. Her only neighbours during her stay would be the flocks of penguins and beaky, vaguely sinister birds of prey called caracaras. At 27, Stevens had been hankering throughout her adult life to write a novel, but life kept getting in the way: break-ups with boyfriends; soulless secretarial jobs; rent to pay, and the ever present lure of the internet. And there was another problem: she didn't actually know what she wanted to write about. She had been cursed with a "boring" childhood, and classmates on her fiction course criticised her work for its lack of invention. Nothing less than extremity, total commitment and total isolation, she concluded, were what she needed to break the deadlock. Bleaker House is the book that she did, in fact, pull together out of her stay on the island. But it isn't the long-planned novel; it is a book about writing a book, a kind of bibliomemoir. It includes some narrative about Stevens's predictably bleak and depressing time on Bleaker, during which she lived on a diet of instant soups and carefully rationed raisins (one of her conclusions is that, unsurprisingly, it's quite hard to write when you are starving). We learn that being completely alone is not great for her mental health -- she makes friends with a potato, and obsesses about face cancer -- but it's not quite bad enough for her mental health to be properly interesting. Her personal grooming does seriously suffer, however, and we are treated to descriptions of the dry skin she develops on her feet (no room on the micro-plane for a pumice), and several mentions of how much weight she loses. As not much happens on Bleaker, these musings are necessarily interwoven with scraps of the novel she was trying to write (perhaps intended to illustrate the point that it was pretty awful), advice from her creative writing teacher, reminiscences of her life before Bleaker, and other fictional character studies. Stevens writes with considerable charm and winning honesty, but there is not enough here in the way of a sustained narrative; it is fragmentary, more of a scrapbook than a book. Its target readership is presumably other people who want to write books, but haven't quite got around to it yet (when I recently got a job organising a literary festival, one old hand told me: "Make sure you put on events about how to write a book. They always sell out first"). Stevens's whole point, it should be made clear, is that she was foolish and naive to think that going to Bleaker could make her into a novelist. Frustratingly, though, she never subjects the original impulse to any scrutiny. Why did she want to write a novel, when she felt that she had nothing to say? She seems to have a sense of herself as "boring" and normal, and a drive to manufacture these big, daring adventures in order to compensate. She tells a story about how, after her first year at university, she took off for Lebanon to teach English in a refugee camp, inspired by a short story by the Palestinian writer Samir el-Youssef. But she felt nervous about teaching, and when war broke out and she was bundled out of the country by a private security firm, it came as something of a relief. More alarming is an anecdote about her responding to her classmates' criticisms of her writing as "prudish" by scouring Craigslist for adverts placed by men seeking sex, and then responding to offer her services. She did this under a false name, but went on to meet one of them in person, alone, in the name of research. She was lucky that the consequences were nothing worse than an unwanted kiss. The punchline, as she puts it, is that she did leave Bleaker with a book. But what kind of book? I'd say it's a book by somebody who hasn't quite figured herself out yet; a young writer who should, perhaps, have held off until she was ready to write the novel she had always dreamed of. - Alice O'Keeffe.
Kirkus Review
On a remote island, a young writer assesses her talents and her dreams.Completing an MFA degree at Boston University, Stevens was awarded a three-month fellowship to travel anywhere in the world to work on the novel she was determined to write. Deciding that she needed complete solitude, she chose to travel 9,000 miles from her native England to the Falkland Islandsin winter. In her delightful literary debut, Stevens chronicles life among the penguins and caracara birds on Bleaker Island, population 3, where for weeks she was the only inhabitant. "I wanted to find out everything about myself," she confesses, "not just the profound and often boring things to do with childhood memories and self-respect, but also the practical stuff, like what my first book will actually be about." But that revelation eluded her as she concocted a trite narrative about a young man who travels to the Falklands in search of a father he thought was dead. Stevens intersperses chapters from the novel-in-progress and, as she readily admits, it is indeed dreadful. The memoir, though, is fresh and spirited. She spent several weeks in Stanley, the Falklands' capital, a desolate city with "no cinema, no theatre, no evening entertainment" except for seven pubs. "By ten o'clock most nights, everyone is exceedingly drunk," she learned. And often they drive their Land Rovers into one of many deep drainage ditches. Stevens was eyed with distrust by residents who believe "that foreigners who come in and ask questions are bad news." Journalists and Argentinians are especially suspect. The owners of the guesthouse on Bleaker Island were welcoming, though, and Stevens learned how to spin yarn from sheep's wool, herd pregnant cattle, and find her way home in a fierce storm. Lively flashbacks round out a memoir that might have been too tightly focused on desolation and failure. At the end of her island experience, she reports happily, "I have freed myself of a bad book. I will write a better one now." This engaging debut fulfills her confident prediction. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
This mostly memoir grapples with the messy, uncomfortable space where untested ideas meet reality. Stevens receives a three-month fellowship to write anywhere in the world, and she chooses Bleaker Island in the Falklands, in the South Atlantic, with the idea that an isolated, distraction-free environment will morph her into a focused writer. In reality, with only wind and penguins for company, she devolves into anxiety, defined by raisin counting and decreased productivity. Stevens decides her novel is a failure, yet she presents readers with a book that succeeds. Bleaker House is a chapter-by-chapter mix of travelogue, fiction, and personal essay, and all of these elements interact in satisfying ways. Knowing about the workshops and life events that shape her tales makes reading them even more compelling. Comparisons to Cheryl Strayed's Wild (2012) are inevitable, as both books present women on solitary journeys that test their physical endurance, and from which they emerge transformed as people and writers. Stevens does not dive as guts deep as Strayed, but like so many before, she travels around the world to locate herself.--Dziuban, Emily Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE CRISIS OF THE MIDDLE-CLASS CONSTITUTION: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic, by Ganesh Sitaraman. (Vintage, $17.) The Constitution was predicated on having a thriving middle class, and today's widening inequality poses an existential threat. In this call to arms, Sitaraman excels in "helping understand how our forebears handled it and building a platform to think about it today," Angus Deaton wrote here. LINCOLN IN THE BARDO, by George Saunders. (Random House, $17.) In 1862, Abraham Lincoln visits the grave of his young son Willie, where he encounters a chorus of ghosts in limbo. Their voices - of slaves and slavers, doomed soldiers, priests - narrate the country's descent into war; as Lincoln mourns he becomes a steward of the nation's tragedies. The novel won the 2017 Man Booker Prize. BLEAKER HOUSE: Chasing My Novel to the End of the World, by Nell Stevens. (Anchor, $17.) As part of her M.F.A. program, Stevens is awarded a fellowship to travel virtually anywhere; she chooses the remote Falkland Islands to complete a book. Her memoir traces the fits and starts of the writing process and shares some hard-won insight. "Surrounded by people, it is easy to feel alone," she writes. "Surrounded by penguins, less so." A SEPARATION, by Katie Kitamura. (Riverhead, $16.) An unnamed, 30-ish British narrator tracks down her estranged husband, Christopher, in Greece after her mother-in-law intervenes; Christopher is traced to the southern Peloponnese, where he's supposedly studying mourning rites - and where marital deception proliferates. Our reviewer, Fernanda Eberstadt, praised the novel's "radical disbelief - a disbelief, it appears, even in the power of art - that makes Kitamura's accomplished novel such a coolly unsettling work." THE VANQUISHED: WHY THE FIRST WORLD WAR FAILED TO END, by Robert Gerwarth. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $17.) In the years between 1918 and 1923, crumbling empires, economic depression (along with the lure of Communism) and flawed peace negotiations helped set the stage for another global conflict. Gerwarth's fine history examines the legacy of World War I, with a focus on the "mobilizing power" of defeat. THE HEIRS, by Susan Rieger. (Broadway, $16.) A cryptic final wish sets off a knotty family drama; as the Falkeses mourn their patriarch, Rupert, a woman emerges and claims he was the father of her two sons. The evidence is plausible enough, and his family struggles to interpret the news. "Rieger convinces us that knowing the truth - believe it or not - doesn't necessarily settle everything," Caroline Leavitt wrote here.
Library Journal Review
Memoir, travelog, writer's lament, Stevens's book is a lot of things-a glimpse at an author's process, a rumination on loneliness vs. solitude, the consequence of a seemingly arbitrary choice (take a map, pick a place), and what happens when you try to survive on powdered foods and Ferrero Rocher for an extended period of time. Eat, Pray, Love this is not, though that does make an amusing cameo. Stevens isn't out to find herself; she's out to find her novel. She wants to thrive on extreme discipline and no distractions and travels to Bleaker Island in the Falklands to work. What happens in between is the story of creating this volume. In a curious, experimental blend of fiction, memoir, and story, this book takes the reader on an unexpected journey. You expect to discover a novel at the end, but instead you unearth a voice that is as unique as the rugged little island of Bleaker. VERDICT A treat to read, this book is definitely a genre bender, perfect for readers of literary fiction, short story collections, and/or creative writing memoirs.-Gricel Dominguez, Florida International Univ. Lib. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.